"I'll be back in two weeks," was the last thing he said to me. "I'll call you every day." That was late spring; then it was undeniably summertime. At the request of Johnny's roommates, I cleaned what was left of his stuff out of the sunroom where they'd piled it: baby oil, porn-store tokens, various videotapes of Angry Anal 1 through 35, a hotel receipt, a notice that he'd been fired, overdrafts from the bank and a hardcover therapy book with the pages cut out at the center and what I guess was a crack pipe inside — something like a charred test tube. When I lived in Chicago, those things littered the stairwell. "Well," I thought, "at least he didn't bring any of this with him. Maybe he thought he wouldn't need it in his new life thousands of miles away."
At home, I stuck Angry Anal 10 in the VCR. I watched two men simultaneously fuck a woman who moaned and moaned. The men took turns losing their erections, pulling out, making her suck them until they got hard again, then sticking it back into her asshole or her cunt. She just kept moaning.
I tried to imagine what this must have looked like to Johnny when he started being shown these movies as a five year old. Was hardcore porn for him what easy listening was to me? Another world we could pretend we inhabited, instead of the one we really did? Even now, a song from my childhood will come on the radio, like "Brandy," and I forget who I am and where I am; for two-and-a-half minutes, I am a barmaid in a port town. I love a sailor; I see the ocean in his eyes, the flashing rage and glory, and though I am beautiful and faithful and kind, he will never make me his bride, for he is already married to the sea, and I won't even mind.
My sister and friends were furious at Johnny's rude defection, and even more furious at my lack of fury. This cheater, this liar, this money-blower! How could I still speak of him affectionately? But I thought the world was a better place for having him in it. "In what
There is something so deliberate and vicious about the healthy, the faithful and unlying.
possible way does he make anything better?" my sister spat. "He's a con man. A spoiled brat. So he had a rough childhood. Boo hoo. Who hasn't?" My husband was bitterest of all. He'd given me everything, and Johnny had given me nothing, yet it was my husband I hated.
Everywhere I walked, living things were in bloom. I hoped my husband's new woman was taking care of mine. My husband had no interest in landscaping. I'd let him think, since he enjoyed thinking it, that clerks took advantage of my ignorance, and that's why I'd come home with the scrawniest, dyingest, saddest of bushes, plants, baby trees. But of course I chose them. If there was no hope of bringing them back to life with tender care, then there was no hope for any of us, was there?
Throughout my strange, tenuous marriage, I'd dreamt about my plants at night and by day I fought back the onslaught against them — slugs, drought, my husband's random placement of lawn furniture. My successful, fit, jocular husband felt like blight to me. One Mother's Day, I went out into the back yard and found seven baby trees dug up, a six-foot weeping willow ensconced in their place.
"What did you do?" I cried.
"You said you like weeping willows," he said. "And you're always trying to get me involved in your yard stuff. I thought you'd be happy."
"You killed my baby trees."
"They were gonna die anyway. They were all brown and going bald, honey! C'mon, didn't I get you a nice tree?"
There is something so deliberate and vicious about the healthy, the faithful and unlying. Or maybe it just seems that way to me, because we are different species. The cat is not evil; he just seems that way to the mouse. The prosperous and sleek are so far away from my understanding, it's almost as if they aren't really alive. They are a myth we whisper to each other, we huddled survivors of the apocalypse as we stitch each other up. n°
